U.S. Army Captain Michael Kelvington, commander of the Battle company, 1-508 Parachute Infantry battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, bows next to remains of Gulam Dostager, a member of Afghan Local Police who was killed in the blast of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) during the joint Tor Janda (Black Flag in Pashtu) operation, in Zahri district of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan May 25, 2012.  REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov  (AFGHANISTAN - Tags: MILITARY CIVIL UNREST CONFLICT TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

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Members of the U.S. Navy Blue Angels fly over the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan as part of the 25th annual Fleet Week celebration in New York, May 23, 2012.  REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz (UNITED STATES - Tags: MILITARY ANNIVERSARY TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

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FACTBOX: Five facts about accused Nazi guard John Demjanjuk

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Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:24pm EDT

(Reuters) - Following are five facts about John Demjanjuk, who was taken from his home in Ohio on Tuesday to stand trial in Germany, accused of being a Nazi death camp guard.

* Born on April 3, 1920, in Kiev, Ukraine, he said he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944. He immigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen in 1958.

* He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the notorious guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 people died.

* The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the Treblinka guard.

* He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and, in 1998, the United States restored his citizenship. But the U.S. Justice Department the following year refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and hid the facts when he immigrated.

* A federal judge rescinded his citizenship in 2002 and he was ordered deported in 2005. He fought deportation for years in a number of courts but Germany finally issued an arrest warrant charging him with complicity in the death of 29,000 Jews and requested his deportation.

(Writing by Mike Conlon in Chicago and James Viciniin Washington; Editing by Xavier Briand)

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